I have registered here just to ask for your opinions and hopefully find a resolution to my problem.

I quit back during WotLK due to the seemingly mindless amount of thought that Blizzard put in to the game, and it felt more like they just threw out an expac then anything.

However, I have been convinced to give World of Warcraft another go, as a friend was very persuasive.

Upon returning to WoW, I found that Warsong-US (which was almost crippled when I left with 1-2k queue times, and alliance's massive growing multi-language population (no offense, just makes coordination harder and the community smaller), had entirely finished itself off. According to the census data (which has been mentioned to not be as accurate as it was in the past) the alliance to horde ratio has shifted greatly with all the english speaking alliance taking their open transfers off the server.

This has left the server dead in my opinion, and almost unplayable unless I was to learn portugese or russian and even then the population is massively small.

Which all has raised the great question of "Where do I go now? What's left for me?"

My friend in his brilliance started on Hyjal-US Alliance with another friend of his, so I tried to play there, but it is a ghost town for the most part, and hardly worth character transfers to go to.

I have been considering Burning Blade-US and Tichondrias-US. Even though Tich shows up on the census as having low population and out of balance ratio, I do remember it being a great server back in the day, and reputable as Warsong was and am hoping it hasn't changed from that.

I've also noticed the older the servers are, the more out of balance, and underpopulated the census data shows. I'm curious as to if this is actual data, or if it its just misleading census data. I do understand WoW is dying and that no one really wants to start a server with 15k geared level 85s standing over them all the time, which is caused my problem also as I quit during WotLK and had never reached 85 (although I have a long history of pre-expac and post-BC raiding).

I've been trying to find a mostly balanced PvP server with a good size population or at least an active population. Preferably with a larger amount of mid level players starting out, or rolling there.

But after going on a few servers and finding out what I can its begginging to look as if I jumped ship during WotLK before the game went to hell, and am now trying to get back on the boat while its sinking.

Are there any servers still alive where the glory that was once WoW still exists?

I also apologize for the unneccesarily long post, its 6am, have been up all night, and figured I would get it out of my system before I went to sleep.

I am going to jump over some things so I get to the "meaty parts". In short, the information you have gotten about census data getting less accurate is sadly very much true. If my quick count was correct, out of the almost 300 (298?) US servers 13 (yes, THIRTEEN!) have sufficient data level on both horde and alliance side. EU is even worse off with 9 out of 295? or so. What's even worse is the fact that currently, EU has 46 servers, which have lost data integrity entirely and have no entries on either side in the past 30 days.

This means there are realms with "high", possibly even "full" populations that show up as almost empty (or for EU side, even entirely dead) here. In this sense, the data on most servers is misleading, because with very rare exceptions, the population indicated here is miles and miles below the actual levels.

All this, by the way, also means that WoW isn't dying, just that WCR is in trouble. As I have maintained a very steady level of new ones and updates ever since I cut down my personal list a bit in December, I know for a fact that population levels of those almost 20 realms I keep a steady eye on have mostly maintained or in one very specific case greatly increased their populations.

Another clear sign of WoW's well being is something fairly new. Lots of realms that I keep an eye on are showing a statistically significant spike in their level 20 populations, meaning there are people who are hitting the free play level cap.

A third such indicator would be the popularity of the Russian servers. Almost all of them list as "Full", even during early morning hours and far as I can tell, Blizzard has been conservatively adding servers to them.

And though I have no solid figures to offer, I am about 90% sure that such markets as Korea and China are still growing.

As to your dilemma... Due to massive lack of data, my ideas list is fairly limited... However, you could at least check out the following:

Due to lack of data, I can't guarantee that these ideas are the actually best options. They are based solely on certain observations of the current data on WCR and my personal knowledge of certain properties of the WCR and the actual realms themselves.

All of this is my subjective and personal opinion and should be treated as such. Thank you and have a nice day!

I really appreciate all the information, I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, as I was out of town for awhile.

However, I did check out burning blade after I made the post, and managed to talk to one player who had been there for a long, long time.

He did say that horde lose battlegrounds about 90% of the time, but there was a lot of people to do them with, and queue times were very short by comparison to what they are on Warsong and Hyjal.

I am going to go roll new characters on Dragonmaw, Shargeras, Shadowmoon, and Stormscale when I get a chance also, and attempt to get a feel for the servers before moving a large amount of characters around.

I don't think I will be playing on the RP servers though, I had ran a character on Emerald Dream back in the day and quit after it was apparently "frowned upon" for mindlessly farming Dishonorable Kills by mutilating small towns.

I highly appreciate the suggested servers though, it gives me something to aim at and I look forward to seeing what they're like.

I know for a fact that back when Warsong was really overpopulated, as you stated, that Blizzard offered free character transfers from Warsong ---> Tichondrius. That was one of the servers you mentioned as a possibility. I was Horde on Warsong and we experienced the same thing, over crowding of foreign populations and languages making it very hard to coordinate things. I, as well as many english speaking players I knew, took the free transfer to Tichondrius. So that helps with the info you needed.